Posted
by
Cliff
on Friday May 05, 2006 @08:59PM
from the tracking-your-tunes dept.

subkid asks: "I've tried several different solutions to manage my music collection; iTunes, WinAmp playlists, visual MP3, and so forth. but none satisfy my idea of what I want. I have many thousand files and things are getting a bit out of hand. I like the functionality of iTunes but not the memory it uses. WinAmp uses less but makes finding the song I want is even harder. Things like musicbrainz.org help for making sure the songs are tagged properly but is there an all-in-one solution? How do you manage your large collection?"

I use folders to organise my music... It sound simple and archaic, but it really works.

What I have is a root music folder, in which there are 4 folders, A-F, G-L, M-R, S-Z. In each of those is each Artist. If I have a full album from an artist, then a folder with album name is in there. Otherwise, the tracks are simply dropped into the artist's folder.

That makes finding music easy, and I don't need to have a player open to browse. I also have around 20.m3u playlists for Winamp in Windows, none of w

i used to do the same thing until i started having parties and people looking for music had a very difficult time finding it. also during late night coding sessions, i don't want to have to search through folders to add songs when i can just type in a few letters and click "enqueue". if this doesn't bother you, by all means go for it. but i don't think thats what the original poster had in mind and i stand by winamp's media library or amaroK

I organize my music several ways by having separate directory trees with hard links. I can have several directory trees arranged by artist, album, date, genre, all pointing out to one copy of the file.

FYI, if you are on a windows box, the latest version (5.2) of winamp allows you to access your ipod in the same way that itunes does, through thier Media Library plugin. if you hate itunes then you never have to open it up to interface with your ipod. it is even stable.

However, the 5.2 version breaks the 5.1+ml_ipod plugin combination's ability to *rip* music off of ipod onto your computer.

root music directory, then subdirs like rock, soundtracks, synth, relaxing, fun, strange shit and unsorted.then each of these subdirs has subdirs itself - artist names. each artist has subdirs - album names.

very easy actually. i browse the subdirs with total/midnight/norton commander anyway.

People bitch about iTunes memory consumption because it is abhorrent. I have iTunes opened to my Library now, and have the browse option enabled. My current selection is the Default All Genre, Artist, and Albums. iTunes is eating 186,172K of memory. When I'm trying to find music in its Library interface the memory consumption never drops bellow 100MB and often climbs near 300MB. When I first open iTunes regardless of where I am in the interface, 90MB are used. I currently am playing music and have my winamp

amaroK is not bad, and it's the nicest thing I've seen on linux by far, but it still has some problems. The biggest one is that it is just not reliable for me. Sometimes it just up and quits with no explanation. Sometimes it gets wedged in some way such that it just stops playing, and won't start up again until you restart it.I rarely can get through a whole day without having one of these happening, so I usually just go back to mpg123.

I've been using it for quite some time, its organization features are great for finding and grouping your music by artist, album, genre etc. The ability to download album covers and identify music through musicbrainz is nice, you can edit the m3u tags at runtime, the playlist is easy to use - drag and drop from the filesystem or click inside the collection browsers, and it has a nice interface for browsing and listening to Internet radio streams. It rates the music by frequency as you listen to it, allows y

If i have more than 5 songs from one artist they get there own folderif ive got complete CDs from an artist, each album gets a folder within the artist's folderless than 5 songs, artists are sorted by name into and "A" folder or a "B" folder.

ive been using this system for 8 years and has worked out well for me.with winamp there is an option in the context which can add the contents of a folder to a playlist. This gets around having the create them in winamp, than having to do something with those files.

I've found winamp to be the most functional when it comes to managing large music libraries. Large meaning 20,000+ songs. I find Windows Media Player to have the nicest interface for managing, sorting, and creating playlists, however it becomes dog slow when your collection reaches five digits. iTunes is also laggy, so I do not use that anymore. Winamp is always responsive (the player doesn't lock up while searching the library), but uses the most memory. While the UI isn't the best, it is better than iTunes.

I wish amoroK [kde.org] could be ported to windows (maybe a summer project, we'll see). It uses either MySQL or PostgreSQL for very fast response, has a very intuitive interface (better than iTunes, IMHO), and very stable for an open source application. It ties in to Last.FM and provides similar features locally, making it hands down the best for managing large music collections. Downside, it's UNIX only.

Not saying anything is wrong with UNIX or Linux, but lets face it.. Windows and Mac OS X rule the desktop. Oh, and FWIW, iTunes on Mac OS X is *much* more responsive than iTunes on Windows with the same media library.

amaroK will be ported to Windows once the KDE libraries have been ported to Win32.

amaroK isn't perfect, however. It does crash/hang a lot. Barring that, it is the best music player out there. I have roughly 10,000 songs in my collection, and that does make amaroK a bit of a memory hog. Using MySQL for a database is roughly equivalent for memory usage, and I didn't notice a difference in speed for it, either.

i use kde myself, i respect all of the hardwork put in by the kde devs, but lets seriously face it.. it's bloated, there is no such thing as QA testing (well thats an argument for 99% of open source software), and its not as intuitive as windows or mac os x. during the short period of time i tried to switch my laptop to unix only (i try about 4 times a year to check for improvements), i experienced kde's dcop manager crashing (making kde practically useless), lack of similar applications that i used in win

It is basically WinAmp with more database functions and so forth... give it a whirl. It's great for tagging (uses Amazon and even fetches album pics) and has iPod support. The down side is that some features aren't unlocked until it is paid for (cracked, serial'd, etc).

From the looks, MediaMonkey looks more like "basically iTunes with a litle bit more functions" than "basically WinAmp with more database functions".I'm not just talking about brushed metal theme. If you look at their features page (I've not downloaded it and the proper version - Gold - costs money, and iTunes comes free with my iPod, I mean free for everyone), you'll see these items:

Well, you're far from the only one to have thousands of files, so if you care to know (since you're asking you probably do), here's how I do to manage my music collection.

I use iTunes. In one big folder, I move full albums that are in one folder, then I drag em in iTunes in order to make them have one playlist matching to each album, then I listen to each song of the album I just added, and when there's a song I like, I drag it on a playlist, that we'll call "~To Take", and then I create another list nammed

memory is cheap, cpu cycles are not. with my library, searching for a song in iTunes takes up to 15 seconds before it updates the list. contrast to winamp that does it in 5. i used to use media player which took ~20 seconds, but people who came over to listen to music always complained (what self-respecting geek wants *anyone* complaining about their computing setup) so i switched it up. plus winamp provides rating support, a decent playlist manager, and AVS. iTunes does not compare (unless you buy mus

I have about 5500 songs in iTunes and when I do a search, it instantly gives me results, not even a 5 second wait. Although I do have a pretty speedy machine, I still didnt have any problems when I was using an athlon 1800+. Thats actually the reason why I stopped using winamp. I could have my entire library at the tip of my fingers and searching was instant.

Same cpu/ram/os here, i have 20K songs on a raid 10, search is instantaneous if itunes is loaded into ram. But if I have something running that makes it page out (vpc, wow, etc), it takes a minute to respond. I guess if I had another gig I wouldn't have this problem.

iTunes is currently using 35 meg here, and I have a pretty large collection. Winamp must use something insanely small for people to be complaining so much about iTunes memory usage. CPU usage seems to be fairly low too, at 4.5%, I'm not complaining. Also nice frontends to iTunes make searching and playback even easier. Have a crack at CoverFlow [steelskies.com].

Thanks for reminding me that I've been meaning to get some Acid Horse. In fact, I'm going to get the entire WaxTrax BlackBox collection thanks to your page. The KLF, 1000 Homo DJ's, ClockDVA, KMFDM, Ministry.... oh and of course Divine.

I have about 17,000 MP3's (all legitimately purchased, ripped from my CD collection or bought online) and manage them with Slimserver [slimdevices.com] from Slim Devices, along with three of their Squeezebox client/players. Works great: this provides a completely catalogued and automatable music system throughout my home.
I don't care about portability outside the house, so YMMV.

While I love the SqueezeBox, I find the slimserver's (web-based) UI to be slow, clumsy, and frustrating. It takes forever to make a decent sized playlist. Maybe I just haven't learned how to use it properly.

slimserver has also, until recently, been plagued by all sorts of weird bugs. They just released 6.2.2 which seems to have most of the problems fixed that I was running into; just in time too, I was getting ready to chuck the whole thing and go back to Winam

What I do is basically I am completely nazi-ish about how my music is named, and tagged. Every single piece of music that goes into my collection is first passed through musicbrainz, and then sorted into the correct folder. The root directory is called Audio. From there, it goes into category, such as Classic Rock, Metal, etc. After that, it's sorte

..but if anyone's interested in what I do on my linux running laptop, I'll explain it. I use KDE which comes with JuK and I put on Kid3. I keep the folders organized by genre then artist then album. Kid3 keeps all the tags neat and clean. I then pull all the folders in JuK and it's great. Simple and fast searching. I find amaroK to be too much and I prefer the interface of JuK. Of course, the key is keeping the tags straight with Kid3.

I've come to like musikCube [sourceforge.net] for a Windows player and indexer. It finds files automatically if you give it the directory and, if the files are tagged correctly, you get a decent search it seems. I don't have that much music ripped to my computer, though, so I don't know how it handles larger collections for sure, but it looks promising. (The support for FLAC is what made me download it in the first place.)

I would like to set up a hard drive on my dedicated Linux box with my entire music collection in FLA

I run one of the biggest anime/video game music FTP servers on the 'net (90GB+ and still growing daily, and it's tuxedojack.dyndns.org, by the way).

I have a separate drive for my music, then on that drive are three folders - Distributable, for stuff that I can put on the FTP server (anime OSTs, video game OSTs, and stuff that I can legally distribute); Nondistributable, for stuff the RIAA would sue my ass off if I ever traded; and Incoming, for stuff that's torrenting and hasn't gotten a positive ratio yet.

Inside each folder, the songs are sorted by series/artist/title at the second layer, then album as the third, then disc as the fourth. All the while, I'm using folders, and actual file management, as this _is_ for a FTP server.

If you want to see a folder tree, take a look at this (warning, it's a 2.4MB text file, but it's an inventory of every song in the Distributable folder tree):

At The Internet Archive we have about 120,000 audio [archive.org] and live music [archive.org] shows, occupying about 53TB of disk space. We're always trying to think of new and better ways to present it to our users.

I'm going to look at all the solutions people have suggested here and try to glean some usability tips which might be implementable on top of our existing interface. Please keep up the good suggestions!

I use foobar2000 [foobar2000.org]. I migrated to it after almost eight years of Winamp usage once I noticed that Winamp don't support Unicode.

Plus foobar2000 is the first player I have found that has an interface that looks like all of my other programs. All of the other media players look like some amateur art student trying to reinvent a UI (and failing miserably). foobar2000 has a tabbed interface with separate playlists in each tab which is nice. I like the sparse interface. Some people hate it, although if you are willing to invest the time there are a lot of ways to customize it to make it look much nicer. foobar2000 is nice and fast too, at least until you try to seek through a MP3.

I keep my files on my Linux server. I have a raid array with a LVM volume called music with MP3 subdir (as opposed to other subdirs like C64-SID and AmigaMods). I then have the following broad directories:

Audiobooks

Classical

Comedy

Folk, Ethnic, & World

Jazz

LargeSets

Miscellaneous

Other

LargeSets is for DJ Mixes and other MP3s that are over an hour long. If I have more than two items from a DJ or artist I create folder with their name and put the files in there.

All of the other directories have a subdir and file structure of artist/albumyear-albumname/nn_trackname where nn is the tack number. I find this method to be easy for me to drag and drop music into a playlist to play. I never have gotten used to the iTunes method of importing everything that you have.

One thing that I am going to focus on over the next several months is to sort albums and artists out by more broad genres as I have already done. Eventually I will go back through all of my songs and set the genre for each song. Right now I'm giving each album the same genre rather than tagging each song with the genre that that specific song falls into.

foobar2000 has a tabbed interface with separate playlists in each tab which is nice. I like the sparse interface. Some people hate it, although if you are willing to invest the time there are a lot of ways to customize it to make it look much nicer.

Many of those people that "hate" the default sparse interface [foobar2000.org] (including me) will like the less-sparse but still simple Columns UI [morbo.org] (the Artist, Title, Album, etc information would be there if the files were tagged correctly).

The Columns UI is enabled by selecting the "Foobar2000" menu, then selecting "Preferences," then "Display," then changing "User interface module" from "Default User Interface" to "Columns UI." I think it should be easier to find the Columns UI, but I don't want to complain too much about a great app with so many great customization options.

Here's an example of what Columns UI can look with a few more customizations:

yPlay is a freeware MP3, Ogg*, WMA, WAV, FLAC* and Midi player with multiple playlists and a light, clean interface. But why did I write it when there are other free mp3 and ogg music playing software programs out there already?

First, I find too many music players have tiny, ambiguous controls and overly complicated menu structures. I want computer programs to look like computer programs so I can quickly work out how to use them. If I want something that looks like a piece of hardware, I'll buy

Things get stupid as soon as you bring genre into it. I shudder when I see people including genre in their classifying methods. Both Musicbrainz and CD/FreeDB are way off for a lot of albums.

I wrote this over on last.fm, and it has more to do with with CDs than digital stuff, but it's just some thoughts on how to sort my own collection. Might as well paste it in here.:) Plus, it's pretty metal-specific, so nobody'll know what the hell I'm talking about anyway. (BTW, I use amaroK, with Music/[artist]

I currently have 19000+ songs in my collection (thank-god for NFS) and Amarok easily manages the whole thing.With the ability to connect to an MySQL DB (or it will use its own internal SQLlite if you don't have MySQL to connect to) it keeps track of ALL of you music information (including coverart and ID3Tags).

This is the best tool for music collections you will ever use.Smart-PlaylistsScore-based tracking of your musicfull support for streaming."similar songs" suggestionsMusic Brainz tagging supportand a metric ass-load of 3rd party scripts.

Version 1.4 is rock solid. I have converted several friends to using Linux strictly based on how powerfull Amarok is.

Well, I doubt you'll run off and do what I did, but I'll share my solution to this problem: I use a subscription service, Rhapsody to be precise.I pay $10/mo. and I have access to my music anywhere I have a net connection. There are many pros/cons to doing this, but here's why *I* do it:

1. I use 3 different computers a day. My desktop, my laptop, and my work computer. In the olden days, I used to have a multi-gig collection of music, but this became difficult to sync up. If I got something new on the d

Well, I have around 130gb of music. (Most of it legal, if that matters. When my wife and I got married, we had over a thousand CDs between us, and that was years ago.)

I use iTunes, on an old MDD G4 with 768mb ram. Runs just fine, and feeds our various iPods just fine. I try to manage organizational matters as I add new stuff, because otherwise it's just too big a chore.

There's a revolution in content going on. Between Amarok and the Internet Archive [archive.org], free canned music has never been easier or richer. There's already good collaboration with other free efforts like Wikipedia, I'm looking forward to more to take mass culture back from RIAA flunkies. The non free players, hobbled with DRM, will never match the performance of the free players. This alone is sufficient incentive for people to migrate to free platforms. The whole package is greater than the sum of it's parts.

Winamp's player has a jump to file dialog I can type in and find the subset of files containing the text I've entered (either in the filename or in the ID3 tags). Its media library has the same thing. What exactly do you mean by 'even harder'? Harder than what, having WinAmp read your mind?

My collection is large >60GB. I pretty much have a whole process to organize mine. I put any new mp3s into a folder and then import them into Windows Media Player Library. I use WMP's "Find Album Info" to go through and organize the tags and mp3s. It puts them into folders by artists and then by albums and names them properly. After the tag changes take effect, I copy the folders into my main music drive.

To Actually play the music, I use Winamp. I have Winamp Media Library scan my music drive eve

...I'd suggest JuK and amaroK, they work just fine. Better yet in tandem;) I don't know why, but for me JuK is much better for tagging and physical organizastion of collection, while amaroK is better for selecting music and it's playback from well organized collection.

For Windows, I would highly recommend J.River Media Center [jrmediacenter.com]. It is probably the most advanced and full-featured program of that kind, yet faster and less memory-hungry than iTunes.

For Linux/BSD, there are quite a few choices. AmaroK or JuK are the obvious one for KDE, and usually included in most distros. If you prefer Gtk applications, the best one out there is probably Quod Libet [sacredchao.net] (I would not recommend Rhythmbox as it used to be rather slow and unstable). In the console, there's cmus [dynserv.net] for an iTunes-like n

I use Tag&Rename to organize my collection. It has excellent features for tagging, and you can use the rename feature to implement a directory structure like artist/album/NN - Track.mp3. It also support MusePack.WinAMP has a good music library that makes finding what you want quite easy. The only problem is that it does not support Unicode, so no Japanese track names.

iTunes has good features for managing your files - it can automatically do the directory structure but lacks support for anything other th

I use iTunes on Windows. It's usable although I wish it was a bit faster.When I add large collections of new music (like from www.legaltorrents.com) I prepend the artist's name with a three-digit identifier. In the case of Legaltorrents, there are archives from record labels like 'Monotonik' and 'Kikapu'. The 'Monotonik' bands get 'mtk:' before their names, the 'Kikapu' artists get 'kpu:' and so on. That way they are nicely grouped UI-wise. And when they appear in the Party Shuffle I know directly where the

Here are my measures: 11k MP3 files, 87 G, almost all legit from CD, etree, archive, etc. When it is not legit it is probably something I forgot to download after I listened to it and decided I didn't liked it so I wouldn't buy it.There are different things to make it happen.

First - you need to properly fill all MP3 tags. The less an MP3 is tagged, the less it is searchable...

Secondly - I don't want to have to play music via my PC and soundcard when I'm at home. More - at home, my PC is not the center of at

I've used Madman [sourceforge.net] for over a year now on my home Linux PC. Its AutoDJ feature alone blows anything else I've tried out of the water; typically when I'm at home I don't much care what I'm listening to as long as something's playing in the background. So I click AutoDJ and forget about it, though I may skip past the odd song I'm not in the mood for, or that I don't like at all - and since play count is one of AutoDJ's rules it'll take that into account as it continues. Add a built-in webserver and I can str

I manage a collection of... ahem... some size.Everything's in \Music. \Music has no files, only directories. Most of these are band names (e.g. \Music\Built to Spill) or compilation titles (e.g. \Music\Wedding Crashers). I have some genre titles and decades for assorted songs/singles (e.g. \Music\80s, \Music\Techno, \Music\Jazz) but I haven't fully come to a decision on what to do about those, yet, in this broader framework.

In the individual directories under \Music I have all albums named in the format Art

Anything based on the Musik platform works beautifully, with (I think) and SQLite database and searches just as fast as iTunes. They're a bit more fickle, but if you want to save memory they're what you want. The two biggest are musikCube [musikcube.com] and wxMusik [berlios.de].

However, after using both for a period, I switched back to iTunes because it just works all-around better, and with the Multi-Plugin [osx-e.com] you can set it up with a foobar passthrough and through some mysterious setting drastically reduce the memory usage when it'

Stop assuming that "has lots of music on computer" means "downloaded lots of music onto computer." Ever heard of a CD ripper? People have every right to rip CD's onto their computer, whether or not RIAA wants to put their little "copy protection" schemes onto their CDs, and it's a hell of a lot more convenient than organizing and storing a physical collection of CDs.

Gotta second this. Of course you could be obsessive compulsive about music like I am too and have to buy every album of any band you're into. *sigh* Too bad one cant get too much money selling cd's. I could probably afford a new computer if I could sell them... Have had the impulse to do that once or twice after re-ripping (mp3->ogg->mp3->m4p)... I've gotten pretty good at ripping dvd's in an organized fashion:-D

Really? Can you show me what laws I'm breaking by purchasing goods from a Russian company that can legally sell music? Last I checked, it's not against the law to import goods from Russia.. And that's why the RIAA isn't going after Allofmp3.com.:)

Allofmp3.com has a license to sell music in Russia. Importing (most of) this music to the US is not legal. The same goes for many other developed countries.

Realistically, you don't have to worry about landing in jail, or even about exorbitant fines. In the US, the RIAA basically goes after people who redistribute RIAA-owned music without proper license (a description which fits many p2p users), because those are the people who can incur

'' Allofmp3.com has a license to sell music in Russia. Importing (most of) this music to the US is not legal. The same goes for many other developed countries. ''You are right, but missing the point. Bringing music into your country for personal use is not "importing". Downloading music from allofmp3.com and then selling it on would be importing and therefore illegal (even if you don't keep a copy for yourself). Actually, flying to London, buying 100 CDs in a record store at full UK price, flying to New Yor

OK, that was probably anti-ripping - myself, I wouldn't much care for ripping ants, whether using CDs or not. But nevermind that - you might as well have dropped 'almost', as all CDs come with a copyright notice and in some people's mind that in itself should make ripping illegal, right? Well, let's see

By admitting that you have "ripped" your CDs, you are admitting guilt to breaking the DMCA laws.

Implicit assumptions: an existing DMCA law and either no Fair Use laws or precedents of the DMCA-like laws trumping Fair Use. Let me assure you, frient, you're on VERY shaky ground here. You might also not be aware that some countries allow by law one copy for non-commercial use (private copy/fair use/backup copy, etc.) so your sweeping assertion is clearly wrong in those cases.

In the end, you come off sounding suspiciously like a RIAA troll. There are still legal exceptions to the author's rights, no matter how much the entertainment industry would wish otherwise. Please take your FUD elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the parent is pretty much right. The DMCA basically says that breaking copy-protection mechanisms and tools that do it are illegal. Therefore, you are still legally able to make a copy or a rip of any CD you own but you can't break copy protection to do it. This means that it's very easy to break the DMCA without actually breaking amy copyright laws.

If this actually got taken to court it would probably come down to whose lawyers have the sharpest teeth, but these things usually do. And you

I hate to say it, but no matter how awesome the encryption schemes might be, we don't listen to digital signals, in the end it is all analog and has no right under DMCA with the use of a stereo patch cable and being stored at a 1x transfer rate. Sure this is technically circumvention of the encryption, but as I see it, an analog signal will never have a place under DMCA in most aspects, then again, this is just an engineer's opinion of the signal, DVDs could be copied in a similar manner or maybe we humans

Well, unlike DVDs where ripping requires decrypting the signal, CD ripping saves un-protected audio output to a file. The CD drive producing this signal is not breaking any copy protection, as that is its intended functionality. Your argument would work for the proposed anti-analog-hole legislation, but even that would only be for the case of CDs having the audio signal watermarked/whatever so as to mean 'copy forbidden' - leaving plenty of CDs legally ripable.

OK, so to restate my points: first, there is no DMCA case in ripping CDDA tracks off a conforming audio CD - the proper argument here is copyright, not DMCA; second, not all countries have DMCA equivalents, so saying DMCA breach == ilegal is only true in some particular jurisdictions (hence false as an all-encompassing statement)

Anyway, concerning your encrypted backup argument, I have some doubts that it would work in a technical enough court. The case is, while I can certainly make a backup of the encrypted content, DVD writers will not allow me to restore it to a perfect equivalent of the original, since I cannot write back the disk key. Thus my 'backup' copy is all but useless. If I am legally entitled to make personal backups under some fair-use exception in the local copyright law, then the backup should better be restoreable, which only leaves unencrypted backups.

The CD drive producing this signal is not breaking any copy protection, as that is its intended functionality.

Actually, that's not true. CDs have a "copy inhibit bit", much like the proposed broadcast flag. Almost all commercial CDs have the "no copies" bit set, in fact you have to talk to duplicators to persuade them to do anything else.

The difference is that no CD drive in a computer obeys the copy protection restrictions which are part of the CD standards; whereas most DVD drives in computers obey t

The DMCA has a specific fair-use clause. Which means, if the action you are engaging in constitutes fair use (i.e. ripping media you already own to watch it on your computer), then it is not illegal. This specifically means that the whether the content is protected by encryption has no bearing on what constitutes fair use, and therefore no bearing in whether or not the use is actionable under the DMCA.

Specifically, under section 1201 [loc.gov], subsection c, you will find this text:

(c) OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

The really atrocious thing about the DMCA (IMHO) is that while it allows users to all their fair use defenses that are provided in normal copyright law (including reverse engineering for interoperability, ripping media you purchased legally for personal use, etc.), it outlaws the distribution (and manufacture, which may or not be the creation) of tools which facilitate such actions. We're being fundamentally dishonest with ourselves: we allow people do engage in certain activities, but disallow the distribution of tools that make it feasible for common users.

This, for example, is what makes certain Linux distros have to use offshore (or volunteer run) servers for programs like dvdcsslib, which is used in lots of programs like Xine and Mplayer. It forces distributions like Fedora and Suse to rely on 3rd party servers like livna.org and pacman to host mplayer RPMs.

You can get a Quicktime plugin for Windows Media here [flip4mac.com] and a Quicktime plugin for Ogg here [xiph.org]. iTunes just calls Quicktime to play all your music, so if Quicktime can play it, so can iTunes. Knock yourself out.

Same here. It's not like the songs in my collection change much. If a song belongs in the ~/music/Rush/album/ folder it's pretty much going to stay there.

I also like to use mpd (Music Player Daemon) with mpc (a client for it) to play my music. I don't even have to worry about folders then. Playing songs is as simple as "mpc search artist Coheed | mpc add; mpc play", or somesuch. No need for some bloated piece of software when I can just ssh to my music holding computer and ask for what I want.

Folders. Simple as that! Artist, album, song name. Folders descending in that order.
Movie soundtracks and video game soundtracks have their own exclusive folders outside of
the normal contemporary music hierarchy as does classical music.

Bingo! Same here - We even have almost the exact same exceptions to the default. I
also have an exception for audiobooks as well, though... I could put them under
the author, but they really just don't fit in conceptually as "music". And if I want
to make a playlist o